Vernor Vinge picks up on the milieu he created in an earlier book and expands upon the use of "bobble" technology. The bobbles are stasis bubbles that can be set for durations ranging from hours to centuries. Since nothing inside them experiences the flow of time, they can be used as a kind of one-way time travel ticket to the future. Simply set the parameters as desired, pop up a bobble around you, and see what the world's like in two centuries.

This is what a group of men and women are doing on a deserted future Earth, slowly making their way up the timestream to see what lies ahead, and hoping to come back into synch with the rest of scattered humanity. Vinge does a good job of introducing and developing characters, making you identify with or understand them. The key figure is from close to our time and acts as our point of view.

He is the one that has to investigate what could only be a murder, when the group bobbles up for another leap and one of their members is left behind. For the others, only an instant passes; for the stranded woman, years of isolation and loneliness go by, with her only hope being to live long enough for the bobble to dissipate and provide her salvation and succor. And...she doesn't make it. She spends months struggling in fear and grief, an arm's length and an eternity away from her friends inside the mirrored bobble, hoping, praying.

The tale of her struggle, told in a sort of flashback as the lawman reads her journals, is the heart of the book and is truly heartbreaking. Even knowing that she didn't survive, you find yourself hoping, as you read along with the investigator, that somehow it will all turn out all right. But it won't.

"Marooned in Realtime" is a minor and overlooked classic by an author who creates rich, vivid, intricately detailed worlds and characters and who excels in exploring the ramifications of advanced technology and social innovations. Vinge only bangs out a book about every three years or so, but they are well worth the wait. This is the best of them; give it a try, and you won't regret it.


Stranded   May 21, 2004
 9 out of 9 found this review helpful

Taking place 50 million years after The Singularity -- a point in the 23rd century in which most of humanity disappears mysteriously -- The Peace War's sequel, Marooned in Realtime, centers around a murder mystery. Who killed one of the few remaining humans left on Earth by stranding the person outside of the bobbles -- a spherical stasis field in which time stops -- inside which everyone else was letting the centuries slip by?

Marooned in Realtime is certainly the equal of its predecessor, The Peace War...if not slightly better. In this book, there is genuine suffering as well as genuine hope...both human conditions conveyed by several different characters and both portrayed very well. Vinge makes the reader truly feel for the characters...even the villians.

Vinge also does a reasonably good job of conveying the far-future world...with its myriad of lifeforms and strange ways...as well as describing the peoples' reactions (good and otherwise) to this new world.

The only problem with the story was slight. I thought Vinge could have drawn the action scenes a bit better...I found them to be a bit tough to visualize. (Was that the point?) But overall, Vinge has once again created a marvelous story of a future humanity...one with its flaws and excesses...but also one which should inspire those today to leave our progeny something in which they may not only be proud, but in which allows them the best possible lives they can have...and then to do the same for those in which come after them.


part two of the greatest   October 15, 2005
 6 out of 12 found this review helpful

Bar none the best fiction I have ever laid eyes on. Unless you count Calvin and Hobbes. The best book comprised of only words then. And the only thing more outrageous than the fact that the year "The Peace War" was published, it had its Hugo award STOLEN away by the inferior (yet undeniably more popular) "Ender's Game" by Card, is the fact that "Marooned In Realtime", the second volume of this book, which somehow held up to the unimaginibly high standard of "The Peace War", had the Hugo that rightfully belonged to it stolen away by the VASTLY inferior sequel to "Ender's Game", "Speaker For The Dead", by the same stinker. Oh well. It just goes to show how little the Hugo people know what they're doing. (Their winning choices for short stories are even more ridiculous. For instance, one in particular where the author got EVERYTHING so wrong, even the most basic concepts, it was hard for me to even stand to read, such as the fact that tidal force is proportional to the inverse cube of the distance, so if you approached a sufficiently massive object, you wouldn't feel it until the instant before you were blasted to bits. And of course none of the story's characters, advanced space travelers mind you, had foreseen that this massive object would have a deadly tidal force and were all taken off guard.)

That said, if you give this book a CHANCE, I think you will find it the most compelling, fascinating story you have ever read. Unless you have read things I have not. Which is more than likely. The premise: what would happen if a group of people got ahold of the ULTIMATE weapon? A weapon so strange that no one could possibly have expected its invention, yet so powerful that it made nuclear weapons obsolete, and a few people controlling it could conquer the world? That's The Peace War. The long-term effects of this technology, and long term trends of human technological development in general are what fuel the second book, "Marooned in Realtime". Interesting social analysis, and I think a very likely interpretation of the nature and fate of intelligent life in the universe. Prepare for the ultimate showdown, the ultimate fight for freedom, perhaps even the ultimate battle between good and evil, because the bad guys conquering the world is only the beginning of the story.

I would recommend, however, that you search for "Across Realtime" and get that book. It's both this AND "The Peace War", the first volume in one book, with a short story, "The Ungoverned" in the middle that sort of bridges the two by introducing the main character in "Marooned in Realtime" in the setting some time after The Peace War but not millions of years in the future as it is in "Marooned in Realtime" itself.


Works in many different ways   June 20, 2002
 5 out of 6 found this review helpful

Imagine bouncing forward through time, for millennium, in "bobbles" and the implications. For the mystery fan, there is a murder spanning millennium. For the technologist, there are implications of accelerating technologies, of maintaining personal databases and records through millennium. Vinge's computer science teaching shines through without stifling his imagination. Embedded systems with Intelligence Amplification (as opposed to AI) are explored, as well as wearable (err ..brain-networked) computers. For the historian, there are those groping with the singular change and loss of humanity, and the manner of people dealing with being marooned for millennium (see Albert Camus - the Myth of Sisyphus).

For all this is a great story. There are a lot of fun tidbits thrown in, like; "dragon" birds, who are evolving to set fires to get more to eat, people witnessing plate technonics, and interglobal network hacking (recall this was written before the internet!).


A mind-expanding detective story   August 10, 2001
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

This is a whodunnit to beat them all--who murdered the human race? I had some problems with some of the ideas in the book--namely, that humans zapping ahead millions of years into the future would find themselves on an Earth that was compatible with human life every step of the way. That said, this was a terrific read. Vinge is a rare talent--he writes the hardest of hard SF with style and grace. The story is a vehicle to explore Vinge's concept of the Singularity. This is the idea that humanity is on the verge of transcending itself in one blinding step, through artificial intelligence, nanotechnology, or something yet to come. This book is hard to put down, and one of my new favorite SF novels of all time.